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TBG’s Anupam Shah and Andrew MacDowell

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Watch the introductions for The Pickens Plan’s Heather Lauer and The Bivings Group’s Todd Zeigler during their panel discussion at the Personal Democracy Forum conference this week.

Todd Zeigler of The Bivings Group, Heather Lauer of the Pickens Plan and Fission Strategy’s Roz Lemieux discuss how social action networks are changing politics in a panel at the Personal Democracy Forum conference moderated by the Washington Post’s Jose Vargas.

This week at the Personal Democracy Forum, a tool we created called Twitterslurp was used to track the Twitter conversation taking place around the conference.  In an effort to empower other organizations and conferences to use the tool, we are releasing the code behind the tool to the open source community.

You can download the code and read the documentation here.

If you use it, please drop a link to your implementation in the comments.  We’d love to take a look.

Video by David Cohn

Guest post by David Cohn

Michael Wesch gave an amazing talk at PDF that I dare not try to summarize.

I will point to an anecdote that Wesch used to give insight into how our cultural conversation is changing all the time.

The word "whatever" has morphed over the years.

Pre 1960s: Whatever meant: Whatever, that's what I said.
In the 1960's: Whatever was a call of rejection: "Whatever man."
In the early 1990's: Whatever was a term of indifference. "Meh, whatever." Also captured in Nirvana's "Whatever, nevermind."
In the late 1990 to now: Whatever has become a term of self indulgence "Whatever" from Clueless.

The question is if the internet can create a sense of "whatever" that implies: By any means necessary or anything is possible.

How does the cultural conversation that takes place change as a result of our ever changing mediums of communication?

Guest post by Alan Haburchak

The morning of day two here at the Personal Democracy Forum conference was all about online communities, what they mean, how they can be used and what they say about culture and global culture and society today. Randi Zuckerberg (the other Zuckerberg), Facebook's head of marketing was up first and talked a little bit about how communities have arisen on on Facebook that have lead to real-life movements like the anti-farc protests that occurred in Colombia last year. But other than pointing that that that group had used social media to organize, she didn't have much more to say.

Next up was Alec Ross, who serves as Senior Advisor for Innovation in the Office of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Ross explained how Sec. Clinton is re-imagining the idea of diplomacy to not just be able "white guys in white shirts with red ties" talking to each other, but rather a citizen-to-citizen approach. As an example he touted the State Department's SMS-based Pakistani-relief initiative that they pioneered earlier this year.

The really amazing highlight of the morning however was Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropologist exploring the impact of new media on society and culture. Wesch gave a shortened version of a presentation about YouTube as a cultural phenomenon, which he and 200 students at Kansas State University created. There is video of Wesch's talk at PDF09, though the quality is not ideal. The amazing thing was the collective joy in the room as everyone felt the hope that Wesch expressed for what online communities like YouTube might be able to create in the face of the pessemistic attitude that according to Wesch, had been cultivated among a lot of young people since the 1990s. Highlights from Wesch's presentation were his clips from the Free Hugs and MadV - The Message memes.

Finally the morning closed with Mark Pesce, know as a digital futurist, who talked about the inherrent potenital danger of what he called "ad-hocracies" on the web. As evidence, he pointed to the fight between Wikipedia and the Church of Scientology. Pesce's talk was intersting, discussing how because of their size, the members of the church were able to break the social contract of Wikipedia, ultimately leading to Wikipedia banning them from editing the site. Speaking after Wesch's emotionally charged YouTube presentation, Pesce's point came across as too academic, although important as internet communities reach critical mass.

Ultimately what I and I think most people will take away from this look at web communities is the sense of hope in was Ross and Wesch had to say. Diplomacy can be as simple and effective as sending $5 to someone in Pakistan who needs it from your cell phone, and while YouTube comments may be the worst thing on the internet, the ability of that community to be incredibly personal AND to inspire positive action en masse is amazing.

Guest post by Jessica Rudis

Two of the biggest announcements made at PDF this year complement each other in an interesting way. The first announcement, made on Monday, was that YouTube had launched a reporting center that teaches citizen journalists skills to improve the quality of their reporting.  The second announcement, and perhaps the biggest news to come out of the conference, was that the U.S. Government has launched a project to increase transparency and accountability, providing open data on a new Web site.

These are complementary because, of course, any properly functioning democracy needs to have an informed citizenry.  For years, people have relied on media gatekeepers to set the national agenda, inform them of current events, and act as government watchdogs.  Of course this has changed in recent years, but it will be exciting to see things change even more when citizens are taught how to be better reporters and given the data necessary to track government spending and activity.

Having an army of citizens to monitor government data and report on what’s going on would be a great thing.  It won’t diminish the role of traditional journalism because there will always be a need for serious investigative journalism.  Journalists will still need to go deeper than what is handed to them to make sure the data is accurate, numbers aren’t being fudged, and that secrets aren’t being kept.  The government may say it is being open and transparent, but it is up to journalists to ensure that that is really the case.

One of the themes of this conference, We.Gov, is becoming a reality.  As long as people stay interested in looking at the government data online (which may be hard, with things like the “Charlie Bit Me” video as competition for attention), we can participate more in our government than any generation before us.  We have already proven that citizen participation on the Internet can affect the tone and impact a political campaign, now we have the opportunity to use the Internet to directly affect policy-making as well.

Catastrophic battles have already begun and loom large on the horizon between traditional hierarchal powers and the growing trend of lateral power structures, according to the University of Sydney’s Mark Pesce.

Pesce spoke at the Personal Democracy Forum on the reasons hierarchal structures will lose out to hyperintelligent ad-hocracies unless they learn to reinvent themselves.

The “first casualty of war,” said Pesce, was the Church of Scientology, which last month was banned from editing content on laterally-powered Wikipedia.

“Wikipedia is a social agreement,” Pesce said, explaining that traditional power structures cannot use normal weapons to bring similar organizations down.

Even friendly organizations must explore a way to cross this divide, he continued, using the Obama ‘08 campaign’s “Houdini Project” as an example of two teams with the same goal who failed together.

The “Houdini Project” was the Obama campaigns citizen mobilization campaign, but as election day approached, the strict hierarchy of the main campaign headquarters couldn’t handle the onslaught of information coming in from the public, and the project died a quick death.

“The political campaigns of the future must learn how to cross that gulf,” Pesce said.

Ning’s Gina Bianchini talks to Personal Democracy Forum attendees about working with The Bivings Group on The Pickens Plan’s social action network. Video by Alan Haburchak.

Guest post by Alan Haburchak

It seems like there is a certain generally accepted truth about age and ideology in America: Young people are liberal and vote Democratic while the older generation tends to trend more conservative. There's even that old chestnut usually attributed to Winston Churchill: "If you're young and not a liberal you have no heart, if you're old and not a conservative, you have no brain."

That seems like it would make sense, and is certainly backed up by exit polling in the 2008 presidential race where two-thirds of 18-29 year olds voted for Barack Obama. But in a panel at the Personal Democracy Forum today, Simon Rosenberg and Morley Winograd of the New Democrat Network, presented research that showed political leanings are intensely generational. The Millenial Generation (the kids today, born after 1980 with their Facebook and their Twitter) identify as "liberal" almost two to one. No surprise there.

But, the same survey given to Generation X (those born between 1960 and 1980) when they were the age Millenials are now shows over 60% identifying as conservative, and the Boomer generation (born between 1943 and 1960) split almost down the middle. Young people have not always been so overtly liberal minded as they are now, according to Rosenburg and Winograd.

For Rosenberg and Winograd, the reason for this lies in a theory put forth in a 1991 book called Generations. According to the authors William Strauss and Neil Howe, the twentieth century, and actually the last 400 years of human history can be divided into twenty-year four-generation cycles, with each successive generation conforming to a specific type. Todays Millenials are the current cycle's "civic" generation, they're optimisitic and believe in community action and volunteering (the hallmarks of the Obama presidency). The Gen Xers on the other hand come from the "reactive" generation, characterized by self-reliance and entrepreneurship (the political hero of this group: Reagan).

The relevance of all this theorizing, according to Rosenberg and Winograd, is in how it has and will continue to shape the political landscape of the United States. Given how liberal the Millenials are, and the fact that there are more of them than any generation since the Boomers, they will probably dominate at least the next two electoral cycles, if not even farther into the future. This means that if Rosenberg and Winograd are right, the Dems can plan on another big win in 2012 and probably in 2016 as well.

That begs the question, what comes next in the generational cycle? According to the theory, the next generation is going to fall into the "adaptive" category, which means they might be a lot like John McCain's "silent generation," meaning a lot of them will have deeply-held conservative beliefs and will probably wonder how their parents can be so liberal and open-minded. Plus, they'll want to know why the old folks won't shut up about this Face-Twitter thing they used when they were kids.